Bryan Prince Bookseller is pleased to partner with the Centre for Community Engaged Narrative Arts at McMaster University to present an annual author series entitled Writing Life.
This series, presented in co-operation with The Centre for Community Engaged Narrative Arts (CCENA) at McMaster University, features a Canadian writer in conversation with a McMaster University PhD candidate. Each guest author will discuss their latest book and specific social and cultural components that inform their work, as well as their life as a writer.
Our inaugural guest in the Fall 2016 was Eden Robinson who visited Hamilton to talk about her new novel, Son of a Trickster. Robinson is an award-winning novelist and short-story writer, and is the recipient of the 2016 Writers’ Trust Engel/Findley Award for her body of work. She is a member of the Haisla and Heiltsuk First Nations. Eden was interviewed by McMaster English and Cultural Studies PhD candidate, Kaitlin Debicki, Mohawk, Wolf Clan.

Below is the official CCENA blurb from McMaster University:

Those of us who participate in the Centre for Community-Engaged Narrative Arts (CCENA) believe that addressing the inequities in our world depends upon widespread recognition of the inherent value of diverse communities’ everyday, experiential knowledge: their stories. CCENA aims to learn from the stories and narrative traditions through which communities imagine themselves and their relationships with each other. With this aim in mind, CCENA seeks to support and sustain art-based community listening, remembering, and story-making. We link community members with other communities, and with various media and sources of expertise in order to support them in telling their stories. CCENA works with:

community groups, either existing or envisioned

artists

individual community members

arts organizations

public intellectuals

We take our lead from community initiatives, priorities and needs, and seek to collaborate with those communities, in Hamilton and beyond, to work in the service of shared memory, sustainability, and creativity. In that spirit, we seek to bring together university resources (whether financial, cultural, infrastructural, or research) with community capacities, so that we can learn and retell the stories of living well together.